1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to printing systems, printing apparatuses, and printed-matter production methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
“Shuttle-head” design is presently in mainstream of inkjet recording. However, because shuttle-head printing poses difficulty in increasing printing speed, “single-pass” design using a full-page-width line head is proposed for high-speed printing. Although the single-pass design advantageously increases the printing speed, a printer of the single-pass design ejects adjacent dots with a short interval of time. Accordingly, a second one of adjacent dots is ejected before ink of a first one, which is ejected earlier, of the adjacent dots penetrates into a print medium. Consequently, coalescence of the adjacent dots (hereinafter, sometimes referred to as “droplet interference”) can occur, which may result in degradation in image quality due to occurrence of beading or bleed.
Furthermore, in a situation where an inkjet printing apparatus prints an image on an impermeable medium or a low-permeable medium such as a film or coated paper, another problem can occur. That is, migration and coalescence of adjacent dots may cause an image defect such as beading or bleed.
Conventionally, to avoid such a problem which can occur in printing on a film or coated paper, reducing printing speed, adding a drier unit, or a like strategy is adopted. Meanwhile, existing methods for improving fixation of water-based ink onto a print medium include a method of applying primer to the print medium in advance.
As another method for improving fixation of water-based ink onto a print medium, a method of applying plasma treatment onto a surface of the print medium is proposed, for example, in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-058404. It is known that applying plasma treatment onto a surface of a print medium increases hydrophilicity of the surface. Accordingly, plasma treatment application can improve hydrophilicity and wettability of coated paper which is generally poor in wettability. Plasma treatment provides another advantage that, because of being a dry process, plasma treatment does not require a drying step.
However, the method of applying a primer can disadvantageously increase printing cost with some types of print media. The reasons therefor are the following: the primer applied as pretreatment liquid is a consumable; a device and a step for drying the primer are required. The method of applying plasma treatment can be disadvantageous in terms of safety, size of printing apparatus, and cost. This is because application of plasma treatment to some types of print media requires high-voltage plasma.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems, apparatuses, and printed-matter production methods configured to be capable of optimizing pretreatment according to a type of a print medium.
It is an object of the present invention to at least partially solve the problem in the conventional technology.